VOSpace vs WebDAV

[Mark Taylor]

On Fri, 16 May 2014, Norman Gray wrote:

> > You could then imagine a pretty standard sort of REST API that did then give you parts of the resource
> > 
> > http://ivoa.net/registry/ivo:authority/resourcekey - would return the whole XML resource record.
> > http://ivoa.net/registry/ivo:authority/resourcekey/capabilities - just returned the capabilities
> > http://ivoa.net/registry/ivo:authority/resourcekey/capabilities/1  - the first capability
> > http://ivoa.net/registry/ivo:authority/resourcekey/capabilities/1/interfaces - the interfaces etc.
> 
> 
> I think this is a nice idea.  The fact that Registry entries are XML gives one a straightforward way of naming elements within them.
> 
> I was about to suggest that XPath could provide an out-of-the-box set of rules here, and that .../resourcekey/capabilities[1] would act as name for the first capability element, but "[" and "]" can't appear here in URIs.  But that's just a matter of syntax.
> 
> If this were to exist, I would expect that most users of this would just want to retrieve the whole resource record, wouldn't they?  Or am I missing a use-case?

I'm not totally on top of where this conversation is coming from or
going to, but I think the answer to that particular question is that no,
you often would not want to retrieve the whole record.
For instance, suppose you have an ivorn for a TAP service, and,
in order to submit a query, you just need the service URL.
In that case you most likely do not want all the rest of the,
in many cases very large, VOResource structure.  A related use case
(querying the registry by service type but only being interested
in a small part of each resource record) is one thing that makes
Registry Interface 1.0 a pain (you always get the whole VOResource
record for each result) and RegTAP a big improvement.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/